Ask a woman what she wants in a man and she'll hand you a list: kind, loyal, funny, makes her feel safe. Orion Taraban spent his twenties collecting those lists in good faith, became everything on them, and got nowhere. The list was accurate. It described what she wanted from a man she already found attractive.
That gap between what people say they want and the conditions under which the wanting operates runs through the whole of Taraban's second sit-down with Mark Laita for Soft White Underbelly. Taraban is a psychologist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area who runs the YouTube channel PsycHacks, and he has built an audience by saying things about attraction, power and gender that draw pushback for their coldness. He's comfortable with that. "Sometimes it takes a while for people to realize that you're right," he tells Laita before the recording formally begins.
The conversation lands at a specific moment. Childless women under 30 in cities like New York and London now out-earn their male peers by a percentage point or two, by Taraban's account, while reported anxiety and psychiatric medication use among women keep climbing. At the same time, he sees a political swing back toward traditional masculinity after 15 years in which its core traits were labeled toxic. Both trends are questions he has episodes queued up to answer, and the interview works as a preview of where those answers go.
Good advice sticks only once the patient believes it was theirs
Taraban opens with a clinical observation that doubles as a warning about how to read everything he says afterward. He'll offer a patient an interpretation, watch it get shrugged off, and then hear it repeated back three months later as something the person figured out in the shower. The insight had to become theirs. It had to be chewed on, forgotten, and rediscovered with the patient as its author.
He doesn't want the credit. What he wants is to avoid the escalation that happens when someone feels cornered into admitting another person sees reality more clearly than they do. Conceding a point is a loss of face, and people resist losses of face with everything they have. So the working rule is to always leave an exit. Laita agrees from the other direction: people who "spew truths" make most of us back away. Taraban's phrase for it is drinking from a fire hose.
Keep that in mind. He's about to turn the hose on.
A Survivor season is his model for how masculinity became toxic
Taraban's explanation for why so many men in positions of authority strike him as feminized comes from a reality show he admits he's barely watched. In one of Survivor's nearly 50 seasons, producers split the cast into a men's tribe and a women's tribe. The men won every early challenge, skill or strategy, and the women weren't close. The men had shelter, fire and game. The women were cold and wet under rocks.
The women won anyway. According to Taraban, they noticed that the men's victories weren't evenly distributed: a few high-status men were producing most of the wins. So the women approached the lower-status men with a pitch. You're going to beat us, and once we're gone, you're next, because you can't beat those guys either. Neither can we. Let's team up. They added emotional bait, letting the men see them suffer until the men began sneaking them food and fire, and floated the possibility of relationships once camp had more room. The alliance voted out the strongest men. Then the women voted out every one of their allies.
Taraban reads this as a compressed version of the last generation. Competition for top positions is zero-sum, he argues: more female CEOs means fewer male CEOs. The tool for winning it has been moral, redefining stoicism, strength and confidence as toxic when men display them and admirable when women do. The mechanism for making that stick over time is developmental. More children are raised by single mothers, and he cites roughly 90 percent of kindergarten teachers as female, which means boys receive their first instruction in what masculinity is from women.
His sharpest move is a mirror. Ask a woman whether the traditional definition of femininity, historically written by men, served women's interests, and she'll say no, that docility made women easier to control. Then why assume that a definition of manhood written by women serves boys?
The argument is vivid and thin at once. A single game-show season is an analogy, and Taraban presents it as one, but the leap from a tribal-council alliance to a coordinated generational strategy rests on pattern-matching rather than evidence offered in the conversation. The teacher figure and the earnings gap are the only numbers on the table. It's a hypothesis with a memorable illustration, and it deserves to be held as exactly that.
Attraction comes first, and the checklist comes after
The question Freud called unanswerable gets two answers here. The first concerns what women want in a man, and it's where Taraban's own twenties come in. Loyalty, kindness, safety: he had all of it and couldn't understand why it wasn't working. What he eventually saw is that women want those qualities from men they are already attracted to. Kindness cannot convert indifference into desire. And since a woman can't know whether an attractive stranger is loyal or gentle until she's spent time with him, whatever drives the initial attraction has nothing to do with the list she gives when asked.
This is why he defends the online subculture that teaches men to become more attractive, a project he thinks is disparaged unfairly. "Why wouldn't we want to have more attractive men in the world? How's that bad for women?"
Laita pushes on the other side of the ledger. The female capacity to coax and maneuver a man into doing what she wants is, he suggests, the mirror image of male dominance backed by the threat of force, both ugly at their extremes and neither universal. Taraban goes further. Getting your goals met through other people is power, and it's the safer kind, because when things go wrong, someone else's head is on the block. He calls it the Lady Macbeth archetype, the wife or mistress behind a powerful man telling him he could be greater than he is.
What men want gets a shorter answer. Laita confesses that in his youth the only real criterion was a sexy woman, personality irrelevant, and that he's relieved not to feel that way anymore. Taraban's description of that state is "being possessed by a demon," and he points to a series of YouTube interviews with people transitioning female to male who describe their first months on testosterone. Almost universally they report a new sympathy for men: they can't stop looking, they can't turn it off, and because they retain a female body with no refractory period, they get no relief. Taraban's takeaway is that testosterone programs attention toward sexual opportunity, which makes the documented drop in male testosterone over three decades a plausible piece of why fewer relationships are forming. He declines to name a cause. Plastics, phones, absent fathers, something in the water. Probably several at once.
Whoever does the pursuing ends up with less power
Men have studied women for millennia, Laita observes, and pickup artists are only the latest and most systematic version. Taraban calls them applied psychologists, people who turned on-the-spot attraction into a craft, even if a sexual encounter is a poor thing to organize a life around. His own episode on the subject is titled "A PhD in Men," and the joke is that no equivalent exists. Men spend years and tens of thousands of dollars becoming what a woman might want; a woman, in his telling, might take a weekend course.
He attributes the asymmetry to who holds the power in the current sexual marketplace, and he argues that it hasn't always run this way. In All's Well That Ends Well, a carefree soldier is chased across borders by a woman who eventually engineers a bed-trick to marry him. Old wedding-cake toppers show the bride dragging the groom to the altar. The pursued party had the leverage, and it was the woman who had to study the man. Today the spotlight is on women, men do the pursuing, and women can afford indifference. He expects the pendulum to swing again.
Inside relationships, though, the direction reverses. Taraban says that of the thousands of couples he has seen up close in clinical practice, the woman is the more powerful partner in about 99 percent, a figure he explicitly flags as an impression rather than a statistic. The pattern he describes is consistent: the man never had relationship goals beyond the immediate, while the woman arrives with a timeline. Move in by this point. Propose by that one. Here are three venues I've researched. The man agrees because he's agreeable, or because of a marriage ultimatum, or out of scarcity and fear, or love. Either way, the day-to-day direction of the relationship is hers, to the point where husbands ask permission to leave the house.
Run the reversal test, he suggests. A man dictating where his wife can go and what she can wear would be called oppression. The indignation would be righteous.
Female desire is a flocking instinct, and the flock is now on Instagram
The second answer to Freud's question is the one Taraban has clearly thought about longest: women want what other women want.
He starts with a puzzle. Women's fashion changes every six months while men's barely moves, yet at any given moment the vast majority of women are dressing alike. Constant change plus constant conformity implies that women are watching each other closely for signals about where it's safe to be. He then reaches for a statistical claim: across many traits, men's and women's distributions overlap heavily, but women's curves show more kurtosis, meaning they're peakier, with more women clustered near the mean and more men in both tails. He doesn't cite a source for this, and it's the kind of claim that varies by trait, so treat it as his premise rather than settled fact. The inference he draws is that the fat part of the curve is the safe part, and women, like fish in a shoal, are constantly tracking where the center is moving. Guess wrong and you're the small fish on the outside.
If that's right, then "what do women want" can only be answered by looking at what women are doing in a given time and place. Seventy years ago, when a young woman looked at her mother, aunts and friends, they were marrying and keeping house, and 1950s yearbooks list housewife as the most common ambition. Taraban leaves open whether that reflected biology or imitation, and notes that fewer paths were available.
In 2025 the looking happens through social media, which shows a curated highlight reel of other women's lives. Through that peephole, women see other women getting married but later, earning master's degrees, launching businesses, eating in Michelin-starred restaurants, skydiving, scuba diving, in Cabo with the girls. What women see other women doing is everything. So the signal about where the safe center sits becomes: be a woman who does everything. Career, family, friends, fitness, all of it.
That's impossible for anyone who isn't both very wealthy and very attractive, and a woman who fails to do everything receives a steady signal that she's drifting out of the shoal. Taraban connects this directly to the rise in female anxiety and depression. The suffering is real, he says, and largely unnecessary, because the standard is a distortion. The "everything," he clarifies, is experiential far more often than material. Women want every relational and emotional experience a person can have, and the engine is fear of missing out.
FOMO has a sequencing problem. If you're trying to do everything, you have to ask whether doing this will close off that, and if so, do that first. Two small children at home rules out Cancun and Forbes 30 Under 30, so marriage and children get pushed later. Taraban thinks this is a major reason women are having children later and less often, and that the delay produces worse outcomes as their position in the marketplace declines.
Which brings him to who hates his framework most. Young women, he says, have no problem with sexual marketplace value, because he's telling them they're punching above their weight. Women in their sixties have made their peace. The resistance comes from women in the middle, who are actively feeling power slip away, and nobody surrenders power willingly, whether it's taken by a coup or by time.
The interview's most human moment comes from an old acting-school classmate. Broke and needing headshots, she took off her clothes for a photographer who then shot her for free. She resents having had to sexualize herself, and Taraban doesn't dismiss that. But she also told him it must have been hard for him, because he couldn't do anything to get the headshot. That, he says, is the plight of young men: useless to other men because they have no skills or network yet, and unwanted by most women because they have nothing yet that women look for in a long-term partner. If you're good-looking you can get laid. Most men aren't.
Laita offers Nietzsche: people don't want the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed. Taraban accepts the quote but pushes back on the ideal. Unfiltered truth is like staring at the sun. Zarathustra lives alone in mountain air, and almost nobody can survive there, and even Nietzsche surely kept a few illusions he was loath to give up.
People keep the dream and drop the partner
A quieter section follows, and for anyone in a relationship it's the most useful one. Taraban has watched long, apparently happy marriages dissolve when the couple discovers that one partner is infertile. Adoption, donors and surrogacy are available, but the response is often "that changes my dream too much." The partner turns out to have been a means to the dream rather than the point of it. "It's a rare individual who says I love you more than I love my dream," he says. "If you are lucky enough to find that person, you should do your best to keep them around."
Opposites attract, he agrees, and then don't stay together. Novelty and taboo pull people in; deep differences push them out, because every hour spent getting on the same page is an hour not spent on whatever the relationship was for. His analogy is a company where everyone sits in meetings all day and nobody makes anything. Dating within your culture is easier because the shared assumptions cut the meeting time, though he notes plenty of straight couples overestimate how much they actually share. And there's a biological floor to the attraction of difference: sexual dimorphism exists so that bodies can signal reproductive compatibility across the sex line.
On Laita's question about whether we pick partners to replay a wound with a parent, Taraban invokes what therapists call reenactment: casting a new actor in the old role and staging the same scene in the hope of a different ending. Cold father, cold boyfriends, and this time he'll love me. It rarely works, because the person who set the scene has only ever rehearsed the bad ending. She may even reject the man once she has him. "People are very complicated," he says. "It's good to be simple as much as you can."
Therapy works when it redraws the lines between fixed stars
Does therapy work? Laita's honest tally: two of about a dozen therapists helped him, a couple made him worse, most left him unchanged. Taraban accepts the 16 percent figure without defensiveness. Therapists are like mechanics. Most are mediocre, some are bad-faith actors, a few are exceptional. Insight alone changes nothing; the work happens when a person starts living differently outside the office. What therapy can do is prepare for that, and examine the scripts running underneath.
Everyone is composing an autobiography, mostly unconsciously, and that autobiography is built to justify how the person lives now and where they're headed. Some people's are terrible, not because they're false (no story is objectively true) but because they don't help the person make good decisions today.
His image for this is his own name. Astronomers recognize 88 constellations, and almost none of them look like a hunter or a scorpion or a half-goat, half-fish. The stars are fixed. The lines are ours. What happened to you in your life is a set of bright, immovable points you can't deny or erase. Whether those points form a victim, a hero or a starfish is a choice, and he considers that choice the most basic power a person has. A good deal of therapy consists of asking which parts of the current constellation are true, which are useful, and whether the same stars could be joined into a figure that leaves the person more capable of being well.
Trauma lives in the freeze response
Taraban has stopped saying "traumatic experience," and his reason is a logical one. Two people go through the same event and one is traumatized while the other isn't. If the experience itself carried the trauma, that shouldn't be possible; poison is poison to everyone. So the trauma must live somewhere else. His candidate is the freeze.
Of the three threat responses, fighting requires believing you can win, which is why the Bay Area gets violent protests and North Korea doesn't; safety, paradoxically, licenses aggression. Fleeing requires believing you can escape. When neither is available, the organism plays dead, the way you're told to go limp if a bear attacks, because predators lose interest in carcasses. Trauma is that response applied to emotion. The body keeps aging and events keep happening, but the person stays emotionally stopped at the moment they clenched.
That matters because emotion is a sense, a channel of information about the present alongside memory and perception. A frozen emotional system either sends no signal, like an amputated limb, or keeps sending the last signal it received, which was that you're not safe. No signal is bad. Wrong signal may be worse.
Unfreezing means feeling the thing the freeze was protecting you from, and Taraban is blunt that there's no way around it. "You have to feel it to heal it" is an old therapeutic line he thinks holds up: the feeling is the emotion finally leaving. He gestures at The Body Keeps the Score and admits he can't say scientifically how an emotion gets stored in the body. What he can describe is the other side, where the river starts flowing again and a person's emotions begin responding to the here and now. He compares it to a cochlear implant switched on after 40 years of deafness, and confesses that when he's down he watches those activation videos on YouTube and cries along with the people hearing for the first time.
The dictators of the future will come with smiles
Laita ends on AI and romance, and Taraban doesn't pretend to optimism. New AI products arrive daily. Technology has already thinned relationships between men and women, and if pornography alone pulled a segment of men out of the market, he expects AI plus robotics plus virtual reality to finish the job within a decade.
His reference is Huxley. In Brave New World there's no marriage, babies grow in jars, everyone belongs to everyone else, sensory-enhanced films replace sex, and wages come as soma, a drug with no hangover that buys a pleasant evening or a three-day holiday. A handful of controllers keep everyone docile and content. Taraban expects the real future to blend that with the bleaker world of 1984, but he thinks Huxley had the smarter tyranny. Overt force provokes resistance. The controllers who last will look harmless.
It's an unsettling place to leave a conversation about love, and it rhymes with everything before it. The Survivor alliance, the flock tracking Instagram, the husband asking permission, the emotion frozen to survive: each one runs on a comfort that costs nothing up front.
